As it is with most people, I have been eagerly anticipating the release of Apples newest baby, the iphone 4g. I have waited with most other consumers in this hectic world of commerce for the coming of it, and I was told by the powers-that-be that I would be able to receive my new baby tomorrow, Thursday, June 24th.

Now I am being told otherwise. This morning at the coffee-shop, I was talking with a former Apple employee. He had with him something very very frightening. A sheet of paper that was a blow to my trust in the world at large.

"They handed me this and I just walked out the door." He said.

"I would have done the same thing." was all I had to say.

You see, The only people that will be getting their phone on Thursday are the people who pre-ordered it. No new sales will be made that day. Neither at AT&T stores, nor at Apple stores.

The world must wait until next Tuesday, June 29th, to go to a store to purchase the Apple iphone 4g.

The reasons for this are easy to understand if you step away from your humanity and view it through the eye of the ever money hungry corporation. I know it irks you to try it, but lets see it their way for just a second.

Here's how unimportant you are: They would rather displease a potential customer than a return customer. From the 600,000+ preorders, there are bound to be delays and mis-ships and sleepy employee's that mess things up. So, in order to nip that in the bud, there WILL be a surplus of all preorders at EACH store. So, if a store has "sold" 1,000... Somewhere along the lines of 1,100 will show up at that store.

Obviously the AT&T and Apple employees are going to feel that they "deserve" first dibs and so the supposed 100 that should be hitting the floor are being "saved" in the back as "floor models".

You think that this is not so? Think. I worked at Kay-Bee Toy Store the Christmas that Tickle-me-Elmo came out. How many were sent to the floor from the first shipment? Around half. And that was just a silly doll from the barrio.

This is why you will not get your phone after standing in line for eight hours. Corporate Greed. If there was an incentive program for the employees I am quite sure that the tide would stem and more often than not you would face gruntled employees and not disgruntled ones. however, the Shylocks that sit at the top of the eco-pyramid of both corporations will see to it that money comes in pocket as quick as it can. And whether this affects your happiness is not their concern.

The Atlantic Ocean hurricane season begins June 1, and scientists tracking the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are beginning to think about what would happen if a storm hit the growing slick.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration won't release its initial hurricane season forecast until Thursday, but experts said it would only take one storm in the Gulf to complicate the ongoing effort to stanch the gushing oil and limit its environmental impact.

NOAA talking points list a number of open questions, such as whether the oil plume could affect storm formation by suppressing evaporation of Gulf water and how a hurricane could change the size and location of the oil slick. There's little information about what would happen if a hurricane hit the spill, experts said.

Still, several scientists are worried that a hurricane could drive oil inland, soiling beaches and wetlands and pushing polluted water up river estuaries.

"My 'oh, no' thought is that a hurricane would pick up that oil and move it, along with salt, up into interior regions of the state that I am convinced the oil will not reach otherwise," said Robert Twilley, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University.

"The bottom line is, how much oil are we going to get into our wetlands? We don't know," he said. "This thing is gushing out in these huge numbers."

That's a question that Florida State University researchers Steven Morey and Dmitry Dukhovskoy are trying to answer with computer models of storm surge and ocean currents.

A somewhat mixed picture

"The storm could potentially transport the oil over some distance, we're not sure how far," said Morey, a physical oceanographer. "It could maybe break up the masses of the oil, through mixing. And it could also cause oil to wash over the land in a storm surge."

He and Dukhovskoy hope to have initial results by the time the storm season begins in roughly two weeks. But first they must tweak their computer models to take oil's physical properties into account.

"Oil on water changes the stress on the water from the winds," Morey said. "Oil will essentially slide over the water and change the roughness of the water. That's why we call it an oil slick. ... The waves present a technical challenge, as well."

But Dukhovskoy said he believes the hardest problem might be predicting the size and location of the slick at the beginning of hurricane season, so the scientists can feed it into their computer models.

While the government hasn't released its initial predictions for this year's hurricane season, other experts expect an active year.

Last month, Colorado State University forecasters Bill Gray and Phil Klotzbach said they "continue to see above-average activity for the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season." The pair are betting that warm ocean temperatures and a weakening El Niño will produce 15 named storms, including eight hurricanes. Half of those, they say, will be major hurricanes -- classified as Category 4 or 5.

An above-average hurricane year

Another hurricane watcher, AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi, puts that number even higher. He foresees 16 to 18 named storms, and believes this year's hurricane season is in line with those of 1998, 2008 and the record-setting 2005 season, which produced hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Emily and Dennis, among others.

Back in Louisiana, Robert Twilley is thinking about the worst-case scenario and hoping that if Louisiana's wetlands are hit, they'll continue their remarkable recent streak of recovering from natural disasters.

In 2000, a drought in the southeastern United States turned 100,000 acres of Louisiana's wetlands into mud flats, or "brown marsh." In 2005, hurricanes Katrina and Rita carried Gulf water deep into the wetlands. Slow to drain out, the salty water dried out the marshes, Twilley said.

In both cases, scientists saw signs of recovery within a year. But there's no formula for predicting how resilient the Gulf Coast's beaches and wetlands might be in the face of an oil spill-hurricane one-two punch. And any recovery would come in the face of the ongoing wetlands loss from human intervention like canals and other earthworks that prevent silt from replenishing the coastal marshes. Louisiana now loses approximately 15 square miles of wetlands each year.

"These systems will recover," Twilley said. "It's going to be the length of time that's uncertain. And the important thing is, what happens in the meantime? What services do the wetlands provide the state of Louisiana? Fisheries, flood control, nutrient removal, habitat for ducks and nesting birds."